Meme or Dream? I Love Hydras, Maybe a Little Too Much (Standard)
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Meme or Dream?, the series where we take decks that Wizards publishes over on Magic.gg, stating that they got at least six wins in a row or better at Platinum rank or higher, and put them to the test to find out if they are just as janky as they look, making them a meme, or if something spicy and powerful is hiding behind the janky exterior, making the deck a dream! Today, we have a wild one. As far as I can tell, the deck is Jund Hydras, which is a neat idea. Being able to double up the counters on cards like Goldvein Hydra and Mossborn Hydra with Doubling Season and Railway Brawler looks pretty powerful.
On the other hand, the deck has some incredibly weird aspects. First, it's splashing into black almost exclusively to play Fell, which is like the sixth-best black removal spell in Standard. Second, while the deck does have a sideboard, it's one of the strangest sideboards I've seen, featuring a bunch of random burn spells like Boltwave, Lightning Strike, and Slagstorm, almost to the point of being a transformational sideboard where you can switch from being a Jund Hydra Ramp deck into a very odd burn deck. There's also just other random weirdness, like Loot, Exuberant Explorer in a 22-land deck full of X-spell Hydras that die if Loot's ability puts them into play, or Magda, the Hoardmaster with minimal ways to commit crimes, presumably to use the Treasures from Goldvein Hydra if you happen to draw one and it dies.
After playing a few games with the deck's original build, we discovered a couple of things. First, the deck was a meme. We went 1-2, and the deck just felt super clunky and inconsistent in general. However, we also found that the synergy between Railway Brawler and Doubling Season and Goldvein Hydra was incredibly powerful, letting us build a hasty, game-ending threat out of nowhere. As such, I set about rebuilding the deck.
The new version does three big things. First, it streamlines the deck by getting rid of the black splash for Fell. The card just isn't strong enough to justify making our mana worse, especially since red has some reasonable removal spells like Witchstalker Frenzy and Torch the Tower. Second, we changed the sideboard into something more traditional with removal, graveyard hate, artifact and enchantment removal, and such. We tried the Boltwave plan, and it just didn't work.
Finally, and most importantly, we dropped some of the weird anti-synergy cards, like Loot, and went all in on what the deck does best: building a massive Hydra with Railway Brawler and Doubling Season. The new build has the full four copies of Railway Brawler, and we get a playset of Shivan Devastator as another X-spell Hydra to give the plan more consistency. Plus, we get Up the Beanstalk as card draw and Overlord of the Hauntwoods for more ramp.
In the end, Hydras 2.0 felt better, although we still went 1-2 record-wise, making it a meme. I think the updated version of the deck is super cool, and it was fun to play, although trying to build one massive creature is a super-risky plan in our current Standard format. There's just so much removal running around, which makes it tough to pull off. All in all, I think Hydras 2.0 is a fairly solid deck but doesn't line up all that well with the current meta.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.